Modernity Britain Page 5
The legacy of the previous autumn was Hungary as well as Suez, and at least one biographer has speculated that it was the Soviet invasion that helped give Kingsley Amis a significant rightwards push. ‘I think the best and most trustworthy political motive is self-interest,’ he had asserted soon afterwards in his Fabian pamphlet Socialism and the Intellectuals. ‘I share a widespread suspicion of the professional espouser of causes, the do-gooder, the archetypal social worker who knows better than I do what is good for me.’ Indeed, he claimed, one ‘edge’ that the Tories had over the socialists was that ‘they at least are not out to do anybody any good except themselves’.
Amis would never be part of the post-Hungary New Left, starting to take firm shape by spring 1957. ‘Those who feel that the values of a capitalist society are bankrupt, that the social inequalities upon which the system battens are an affront to the potentialities of the individual, have before them a problem, more intricate and more difficult than any which has previously been posed,’ declared the editors in the first number of Universities and Left Review. ‘That is the problem of how to change contemporary society so as to make it more democratic and more egalitarian, and yet how to prevent it degenerating into totalitarianism.’ Their solution was ‘the regeneration of the whole tradition of free, open, critical debate’ – partly through the magazine itself, partly also through the Universities and Left Review Club, due to hold fortnightly discussion meetings in the ‘comfortable and informal surroundings’ of the Royal Hotel, Woburn Place. All four editors were in their twenties, three of them (including Stuart Hall, a West Indian Rhodes Scholar) were Oxford-based, and the fourth, Ralph (later Raphael) Samuel, was researching London dockers’ history at the London School of Economics. A strong line-up in this spring issue included G.D.H. Cole, Eric Hobsbawm (still a member of the Communist Party), E. P. Thompson (‘parts of Mr Amis’s recent pamphlet bristle with inhibitions against the affirmation of positive, humanist values’), film critic and director Lindsay Anderson (‘Commitment in cinema criticism’) and David Marquand (then an Oxford undergraduate).
The ULR’s second issue (Summer 1957) featured a symposium (including a rather cagey Raymond Williams) on Hoggart’s Uses, while by then the first issue of the New Reasoner had appeared, co-edited by Thompson and his fellow historian John Saville. ‘We have no desire to break impetuously with the Marxist and Communist tradition in Britain,’ they insisted – a rather different stance to the broader-based pluralism of the ULR. The longest piece, by Thompson himself, was characteristically called ‘Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines’. This was mainly an attack on Stalinism, accused of ‘anti-intellectualism, moral nihilism, and the denial of the creative agency of human labour’. But in the last few pages Thompson turned specifically to the British situation, arguing that the working class had, following its considerable ‘1945’ achievement with the establishment of the modern welfare state, ‘got no further because, being pragmatic and hostile to theory, it does not know and feel its own strength, it has no sense of direction or revolutionary perspective, it tends to fall into moral lethargy, it accepts leaders with capitalist ideas’. And he had a pop at the Labour politician Anthony Crosland, quoting the ‘more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night’ passage from Crosland’s recent The Future of Socialism and declaring it an inadequate vision:
Men do not only want the list of things which Mr Crosland offers; they want also to change themselves as men. However fitfully and ineffectively, they want other and greater things: they want to stop killing one another; they want to stop this pollution of their spiritual life which runs through society as the rivers carried their sewage and refuse through our nineteenth-century industrial towns.7
The British Communist Party itself lost some 7,000 of its 33,000 members as a result of Hungary, but the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid decided that this was the moment to rejoin. Even if all the accusations made by ‘the enemies of Communism’ were accurate, he declared in the Daily Worker in late March, ‘the killings, starvings, frame-ups, unjust judgements and all the rest of it are a mere bagatelle to the utterly mercenary and unjustified wars, the ruthless exploitation, the preventable deaths due to slums, and other damnable consequences of the profit motive, which must be laid to the account of the so-called “free nations of the West”.’ A Party Congress held at Hammersmith Town Hall over the Easter weekend overwhelmingly endorsed Soviet Russia’s action and its own executive’s unambiguous support. Among those speaking was a 19-year-old Yorkshire delegate, the miner Arthur Scargill, who told a spirited story of youthful industrial militancy in his own pit and accused the party of ‘criminal neglect’ of the Young Communist League, given that ‘the young people of Britain alone can determine the future of socialism in this country’. A particularly key vote was the heavy defeat for a minority report on party democracy that sought to open up debate. ‘There is an authoritarian tendency in the party, a tendency to distrust the rank and file and keep down discussion’ insisted one of the report’s authors, the historian Christopher Hill. ‘We have been living in a world of illusions. That is why the 20th Congress and the Hungarian events came as a shock to so many party members. We have been living in a snug little world of our own invention.’ Hill resigned from the party immediately afterwards, while a co-author, Malcolm MacEwen, was soon expelled. His offence was refusing to resign from the editorial board of the New Reasoner, high on the party’s index of prohibited publications. ‘The chairman of the panel that heard my case at a perfunctory but perfectly friendly hearing was Johnny Mahon,’ recalled MacEwen about one of the party’s leading apparatchiks and the driving force behind the closing-down-debate majority report. ‘Had we been in a “people’s democracy” I think he would have shaken my hand before firmly despatching me to the gallows.’8
It was about this time that L. Ely of Barnes had a Hoggartian letter in the Daily Worker castigating jazz, rock and skiffle as ‘nearly the No. 1 bore in Great Britain’, claiming that ‘for everyone who finds relaxation and pleasure there are the many whose fostered interest is of a blasé, moronic character’, and calling on the paper to ‘make a stand against commercialism, against candy-floss and juke-box deterioration of our working-class culture’. In fact, at least two aspects of popular culture were now coming under serious threat, one in the long term, the other more immediately. The first was smoking, as a result of the Medical Research Council publishing in June a report that found a causal relationship between it and cancer, thereby cementing Richard Doll’s groundbreaking study seven years earlier. Attitudes did not change overnight: the government kept a careful distance from the report, denying that it had a specific duty to warn the public; Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express inveighed against ‘interfering’ medics; and the Manchester Guardian cautioned that any anti-smoking legislation would ‘run counter to British susceptibilities’, adding that since there was ‘no evidence that smokers harm anybody but themselves . . . an act forbidding smoking in public places would have no more moral validity than one prohibiting it altogether’.
The aspect of popular culture far more imminently endangered in 1957 was the cinema. ‘The standard of films today is not big enough to merit more than one run,’ lamented a cinema manager, Leonard Caton, in March. ‘We have no answer to television.’ Caton’s cinema was the Olympia in Irlams o’ th’ Height, Salford, and it had just closed its doors, with the building sold to a local radio and TV dealer. ‘I intend to open it as a showroom where people can come in to see sets working,’ announced the new owner. ‘The atmosphere is ideal for people to sit down and watch TV.’ Elsewhere, cinemas under threat were resorting to all sorts of gimmicks and promotions to try to retain their once loyal audiences. ‘During the three weeks that The Curse of Frankenstein played,’ remembered the New Zealand writer Janet Frame about her ‘tiring and depressing’ month later this spring working as an usherette at the Regal in Streatham, ‘vampires, stakes, silver bullets, a model of Frankenstein, all in a mixture o
f horror folklore, were displayed in the foyer’ – as ‘all the while the manager, a short middle-aged man with an upward gaze and sandy hair, looked increasingly anxious.’ Still, the cinema kept its traditional uses: one Friday afternoon in May the weather in London was ‘so horrid’ that the middle-aged, highly respectable Madge Martin and her Oxford clergyman husband went to ‘the small Cameo Royal’ to see ‘a naughty French film’, namely And God Created Woman with ‘the kitten-like Brigitte Bardot’.9
On the small screen, 14 March saw the launch of the most celebrated advertising magazine (or admag), Jim’s Inn, with Jimmy Hanley as the genial landlord in the village of ‘Wembleham’ and everyday brands popping up in surprising places. Next day, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (shortly to pip the less establishment A.J.P. Taylor for the Regius Professorship at Oxford) appeared live on Tonight talking about the Ides of March. ‘When that dreadful couple sang their lower-class music-hall turn and ended in each others’ arms before the camera, I felt like walking out,’ he complained afterwards. ‘Nothing I could seriously say on the subject of Julius Caesar, or indeed on any subject, could be worth saying to the same audience as theirs . . . I felt that the whole programme was simply a succession of knock-about turns in which I would rather not take part . . . I cannot appear again.’ Just over a fortnight later – on the same day that the News Chronicle reported that homework standards had not been adversely affected by the end of the Toddlers’ Truce, with a grammar school head ‘glad to say parents here belong to the better classes and know how to control television’ – came a memorable Panorama. ‘It isn’t only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise,’ was how Richard Dimbleby began the last item, going on to deliver a deadpan commentary about the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, with accompanying footage apparently showing spaghetti cultivation in progress. ‘And that,’ he concluded, ‘is all from Panorama on this first day of April.’ The BBC telephone exchange in Lime Grove was inundated with calls – ‘mainly’, recalled Leonard Miall, ‘to settle family arguments: the husband knew it must be true that spaghetti grew on a bush because Richard Dimbleby had said so and the wife knew it was made with flour and water, but neither could convince the other’.10
BBC executives needed something to smile about. ‘Hey, Jeannie! [a benign sitcom] is surely a much better, more attractive and more intelligent programme than The Buccaneers [a pirate series starring Robert Shaw],’ Cecil McGivern wrote in March to Robert Silvey, head of audience research, about the respective BBC and ITV programmes that had been up against each other on the early evening of Saturday, 9 February. ‘Yet its audience was only 9 [i.e. 9 per cent of a panel of almost 500 with access to both channels] as against The Buccaneers 29 . . . This really is discouraging!’ To which Silvey replied: ‘I am tempted to say that if you altered the word “yet” in your comment to “hence” it might have been nearer the truth. Seriously, what warrant have we for assuming that “the best” of a given kind of material will assuredly draw the majority?’ He went on: ‘Surely ITV’s Saturday programme represents a single-minded pursuit of the admass; whereas our schedule looks more like a BBC-type attempt to entertain a wide spectrum.’ Other BBC programmes that evening had included Dixon of Dock Green, Billy Smart’s Circus, The Dave King Show, Twenty Questions and a play called Aunt Mary, while among ITV’s attractions were Wyatt Earp, The 64,000 Question (an American-style game show) and Val Parnell’s Saturday Spectacular. As Silvey conceded about Saturday evenings, ‘the ITV has the reputation now, so for many it’s a case of switching on to ITV unless there is an overwhelming reason not to’.
Altogether, some 45 per cent of all households had a TV set by the end of May; just over half of those sets transmitted commercial television, so far available only in London, Birmingham and the North. In homes where both channels could be viewed, the audience share was roughly 35 per cent for the BBC and 65 per cent for ITV, with the latter doing even better among young people and the more prosperous part of the working class. Soon afterwards, on 19 June, ITV unveiled a big new comedy hit with Granada’s The Army Game about duty-dodging conscripts. Barely a week later, the Corporation’s troubled fortunes were epitomised by the sudden end after three years of its pioneering soap The Grove Family. ‘This programme is going down and down,’ the Spectator had recently grumbled. ‘All the naturalism it once had has disappeared. Even Grandma seldom gets a good line.’ Understandably, the father-and-son writing team of Roland and Michael Pertwee had asked for a break, and by the time they were ready to return, the jobbing builder Bob Grove and his north London family were a television memory.11
On unfashionable radio, a durable innovation was ball-by-ball commentary on the Test matches, starting at Edgbaston on 30 May. Commentators included John Arlott and Rex Alston, with magisterial summaries by E. W. Swanton. The contrast was stark with television (commentators Brian Johnston and Peter West), which that day covered less than an hour and a half’s play, with intruders including Mainly for Women, Watch with Mother (‘Rag, Tag and Bobtail’) and Champion the Wonder Horse. The Test itself featured on the final two days an epic partnership of 411 between Peter May and Colin Cowdrey, leaving West Indies to scramble a draw at the death. ‘Yes, wasn’t the Test splendid,’ Larkin wrote afterwards to Monica Jones. ‘I heard of it only through periodic bulletins from the switchboard operator, but about 5 I could stand no more & cleared off home to listen to the last 1½ hours ball by ball. I revelled in the very facts of the score – the 500 plus for 4 wickets: it took me back to 1938 & 1934.’ For all that resonance, the eight-hour partnership by the two amateur batsmen involved a huge amount of cynical pad play, tacitly supported by the home umpires, to counter the magical West Indian spinner Sonny Ramadhin. ‘I could have wept for him,’ remembered his fellow spinner Johnny Wardle, England’s twelfth man. ‘If he appealed 50 times, at least 30 were plumb out lbw even from the pavilion. It was a great partnership in its way, but an utter scandal really.’
Pad play was part of what was increasingly felt to be cricket’s over-defensive, slow-scoring malaise. Three weeks later, the writer C.L.R. James – West Indian and Marxist – launched an assault on ‘the long forward-defensive push, the negative bowling’ as ‘the techniques of specialized performers (professional or amateur) in a security-minded age’, and called those cricketers ‘functionaries in the Welfare State’. His piece in the Cricketer coincided with the second Test at Lord’s, where among MCC members watching in the pavilion was a retired Eton teacher, George Lyttelton. ‘Weekes was good; so was Cowdrey,’ he reported to his old pupil and regular correspondent Rupert Hart-Davis. ‘I passed him and Bailey as they went in on Friday morning. I murmured “Good luck”. Cowdrey said “Thank you, sir”; Bailey said nothing. In five balls Bailey was out and in five hours Cowdrey had made 152.’12
The Edgbaston match was still in progress when soon after 9 a.m. on Saturday, 1 June at Lytham St Anne’s, one Ernie (Ernest Marples, the energetic Postmaster General) set in motion a rather larger ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment, a machine the size of a small van) to make the first Premium Bonds draw. Since November, the public had bought 49 million bonds; some 23,000 prizes were available, and there were 96 winners of the £1,000 top prize. Later that day, Harold Macmillan, godfather of Premium Bonds, was in his old constituency, Stockton-on-Tees. ‘It was strange to drive down the old High St, now so modern & smart & prosperous, then so drab (but more beautiful),’ he noted, adding that ‘the old Georgian houses have had their fronts “Woolworthed”’. 1 June was also the date of the final issue – after 19 years – of Picture Post. ‘What will the one-eyed monster devour next?’ wondered Anthony Heap, and indeed television was doubtless the major cause of the magazine’s demise, though as one of its journalists, Katherine Whitehorn, has pointed out, Picture Post by the end had ‘completely lost its sense of who it was aiming at’, with no coherent character running through its pages, quite unlike the great days. Still, its death was a blessing for Tonight, with Fyfe
Robertson, Trevor Philpott and Kenneth Allsop all moving in due course on to Donald Baverstock’s talented, diverse team.
Three days later, on Tuesday the 4th, the leaving students at the Central School of Speech and Drama, including Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave, gave the customary job-touting public matinee at Wyndham’s. Among those watching was the wife of the manager of the Frinton Summer Theatre; later that day she wrote to Redgrave offering a summer engagement at Britain’s most staid resort. There was also a surprise in the post for Kenneth Barrett, who ran the John Hilton Bureau, in effect a citizen’s advice bureau subsidised by the News of the World. On Friday he received a typed letter, addressed to the bureau, that had been found – almost torn in two – in a gutter in Soho. The writer was a 17-year-old who had left school two years earlier and since worked ‘as Comis waiter’ in a London hotel (its name missing, as was the writer’s name and address):
Every day when I was on time off I used to go over to Hyde Park for a walk etc because I did not want to stay indoors and as it was summer the Park was the best attraction. But constantly I was followed by men who kept on either sitting near me or trying to make up conversation. I did not realise what they wanted till one day one of these men asked me to go to his flat. I was so scared I got up and ran. This also happened at the tables I used to serve at. The men used to say such things as ‘Come out with me when you have time off’. So I told my friend who I thought appeared to be my friend. But instead of helping me he said that I should go about with these men. These incidents were not only happening in the Park but in the Hotel. Staff rooms etc. So I left that job. I am scared at going to the pictures by myself because nine times out of ten a man always comes up next to me and I suppose you would call it assault me. I go about with a group of friends . . . one of these invited me to his house for a records evening. Well when I got there we played a few records and his mother and father went out to the pictures leaving us in the house. He then asked me to have a friendly wrestle and then after about five minutes fighting I realised that he was constantly pressing himself so close to me that I just could not help myself. You may say to yourself ‘Well why didn’t I try to stop him’. Well you see I like to think of sex doings but I would never let any man go that far. You see that is why I have always let these men and boys do this to me. In other words to put it point blank to you I would never go with a man or boy for money or otherwise. But only do the fairly harmless things. Please do not let my parents know or I would leave home for good. I have just had to let some one know. Please just advise me what to do.13